Peace vs. Democracy in Cambodia

In 1991, the international community came together to sign the landmark Paris Peace Agreements for Cambodia, with two primary objectives: ending decades of civil war that had left millions dead and instilling liberal democracy. Looking back, one of those objectives has been realized, with the country enjoying around 20 years of relative peace, while democracy has never looked more out of reach.

In hindsight, the two goals were always at odds in a country where the major political factions were heavily armed and some were explicitly opposed to democracy. Bringing true democracy probably would have required more conflict, not less, while maintaining the uneasy ceasefire required the international community to look away as the fledgling democracy’s wings were clipped.

The accords also became a defining part of Cambodia’s domestic politics, with pro-democracy opposition figures and civil society groups arguing that they were a continued obligation by the Cambodian government and international community to ensure democracy and human rights. Prime Minister Hun Sen and the Cambodian People’s Party, which has ruled the country for over 40 years, instead saw the agreements as a one-off set of obligations for the 1993 election, which have since been completed and are no longer relevant. Despite attempts by the opposition to drag signatories back in, the international community largely took the latter view.

In 2016, Japan’s former ambassador to Cambodia gave a speech in Phnom Pen marking the 25th anniversary of the accords. Yukio Imagawa, who had represented Japan at the negotiations, called the signing the “pinnacle of my diplomatic life for 40 years.”

“The purpose of the Paris Agreements was to terminate the civil war and create conditions where Cambodian people could determine their own political future through free and fair elections,” he said, noting that Cambodia had gone on to hold four more elections since then, although he significantly did not comment on their quality. He expressed hope that Cambodia’s next elections would be free and fair.

They were not.

In 2017, the country’s only viable opposition party, the Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP), was dissolved by the Supreme Court. Its two founders, Sam Rainsy and Kem Sokha, were exiled and arrested for treason, respectively. The 2017 crackdown was described by many as the death of democracy, but it would be more accurate to say it was simply the moment Cambodia shed its veneer of democracy, which never really existed, despite the international community’s half-hearted attempt to instill it.

“Getting In To Get Out”

While the agreements had two aforementioned explicit objectives, ending conflict and creating democracy, they had a third, unspoken objective: ending the international community’s involvement in Cambodia.

Brad Adams, the current director of Human Rights Watch’s Asia division, was in Cambodia in the immediate aftermath of the Paris Peace Agreements (PPA), from 1993-1998. He served first as a legal adviser to the new parliament, before spending four years as the legal director for the United Nations human rights office.

He told The Diplomat that the international community was “getting in to get out.”

“Their goal was officially to engage in Cambodia and help it become a liberal democracy, but the real goal was to get out of Cambodia” and end Cold War entanglements, he said.

Charles Twining, the U.S. representative to Cambodia from 1991-1995, largely confirmed Adams’ interpretation.

“The widespread feeling as we concluded the negotiations was that it was now up to the Cambodians to work out how they would run their country and to resolve their own problems,” he told The Diplomat. “We supported inclusion in the Constitution of a commitment to a system of liberal democracy, on the basis of pluralism, but agreed in our discussions that it would be up to them to define democracy in a Cambodian context.”

The agreements came after a series of conflicts and internationally supported disasters. The U.S.-backed Lon Nol regime seized power from King Norodom Sihanouk, who had in turn led Cambodia to independence from the French. Lon Nol was then overthrown by the China-backed Khmer Rouge, which oversaw the deaths of nearly one-quarter of Cambodia’s 8 million people. The Khmer Rouge were ultimately deposed by Vietnam, which was supported by the Soviet Union.

After the accords were signed in 1991, the United Nations Transitional Authority (UNTAC) in Cambodia took control of the country in 1992, marking the first time the U.N. had assumed administrative control over a state. While the agreements were signed at the height of post-Cold War optimism for global democratization, the writing was on the wall early on that Cambodia’s democratic transition wasn’t going according to plan.

The 1993 election produced a hung parliament, with the royalist party Funcinpec winning 58 seats while Hun Sen’s Cambodian People's Party (CPP) took 51, with neither commanding an outright majority. The CPP leveraged its superior military strength to force an uneasy power-sharing agreement, with two prime ministers and a minister from each party for every cabinet position.

Adams said after Funcinpec’s victory, Hun Sen “threatened an armed uprising” and the U.N. “folded.”

“While the world basically celebrated UNTAC and Paris when they left, the reality is they left the country as a loaded gun,” he said.

The strange power-sharing coalition unsurprisingly didn’t last long. Hun Sen seized complete power in 1997, which Adams and most other observers characterized as a “coup,” and then secured victory in 1998 after a series of massacres against Funcinpec members.

“I personally dug up bodies of people who were handcuffed, stripped of their clothes other than their shirts and shot in the head,” Adams said, describing the run up to the 1998 election as a “reign of terror.”

Rather than condemning this dismantling of democracy, the United Kingdom’s ambassador at the time, David Burns, gave a favorable review of the situation.

“I was going to say you have an uneasy coalition in Phnom Penh, but in fact it seems to be an increasingly stable situation in Phnom Penh where after the second round of elections the second Prime Minister has taken charge and is now the sole Prime Minister of Cambodia,” Burns said in a 1999 interview.

The comments show a clear preference for peace and stability over democracy and human rights, which gives some insight into the problems baked into the PPA. Bringing democracy to Cambodia, against the will of the heavily armed CPP and Khmer Rouge, would have almost certainly provoked more violence.

“We don’t want Cambodia to be back on the list of problematic countries, people told me that,” Adams said. He said diplomats were so committed to portraying the Paris agreements as a success that they even started covering for Hun Sen’s human rights abuses. “If you wanted to say the PPA succeeded you had to say Hun Sen wasn’t so bad,” he said.

Former U.S. Ambassador Kenneth Quinn, who replaced Twining in 1996, said Washington initially entered negotiations with “great skepticism” and considered the agreements an “unexpected and exhilarating outcome.”

“That the PPA contained provisions to restore the monarchy, permit multiple political parties to exist and contest an election, a free press to operate and for the protection of human rights, was seen as a truly remarkable diplomatic achievement,” he said.

Quinn said given the environment of optimism, he expected a “mostly uneventful tenure as ambassador,” but realized within two months of arriving that the country was heading back toward armed conflict.

Unlike Adams and others, Quinn doesn’t label the 1997 violence a coup, instead calling it a “military clash” that came about through a mutual deterioration of relations between Funcinpec and the CPP. In any event, when the dust settled, the party that had come second in the election was now in control of the country.

Quinn also said the United States remained hopeful that the 1998 election could “restore the status quo ante and restore the key provisions of the Paris Agreement in regard to human rights and political party activities.” But instead it seemingly cemented Hun Sen’s grip on power.

While Adams blamed vote rigging and a “reign of terror” during the campaign period, Quinn blamed Rainsy and Funcinpec leader Prince Ranariddh for refusing to join forces.

“American Congressman Steve Solarz made an impassioned, but unsuccessful, personal plea to Sam Rainsy to join with Prince Ranariddh in contesting the election. By running separately, they divided the royalist / opposition vote,” he said, calling this a “missed opportunity” to restore the PPA’s accomplishments.

A Continued Obligation?

The international community saw the PPA as an opportunity to disentangle itself from Cambodia, but domestic opposition figures saw it as an obligation for the international community to continue to engage in the country’s democratic transition.

“The PPA signatories primarily considered the PPA as a way to restore peace and to hand over control over that process to Cambodian actors, rather than as the beginning of an active commitment to monitor Cambodia’s domestic politics,” said Astrid Noren-Nilsson, an expert on Cambodian politics and author of “Cambodia’s Second Kingdom.”

Cambodia’s most emblematic opposition politician, Sam Rainsy, returned to the country in 1992, one year after the signing of the accords and one year before the first election. “Of course when I returned to Cambodia, I believed that the Paris agreements could bring about real democracy,” he told The Diplomat.

Rainsy won a seat in parliament as a member of Funcinpec, serving as the party’s finance minister. His anti-corruption crusades made him an enemy of both the CPP and his own party. He survived a grenade attack in 1997 that left 18 dead and fled politically motivated charges multiple times, but always seemed to come back stronger, steadily increasing his share of the vote each election. This pattern ended in 2018, when the CNRP was banned from participating in the national elections after a strong showing in the 2017 local elections.

“The lesson from Cambodia is that it is essential to act early and fast when regimes depart from their democratic obligations. This is easier than waiting until later to pressure an established authoritarian regime to accept democracy. Lack of action from the international community paved the way for authoritarianism not just in Cambodia, but more widely in the region,” Rainsy said. He suggested that Hun Sen’s impunity may have emboldened the military in nearby Myanmar to stage its most recent coup as well.

The international community saw the accords as a handover. But from Rainsy’s point of view, they were a contract – one that Hun Sen failed to honor and which the international community subsequently failed to enforce.

“Failure to embrace democracy and political pluralism leaves the country in breach of its international obligations in the Paris Peace Agreements,” he said in an email.

Noren-Nilsson said the CNRP attempted to “keep the document alive” in order to force PPA signatories to remain “involved and implicated in current, even day-to-day, political developments.” She said this is likely at odds with the expectations of the international community.

“No end date is specified in the PPA, but signatories likely did not foresee that the agreements would be the starting point of, and reference point for, a long arc of political contestation. I do think that the signatories would have been taken aback if they were told that the opposition would insist on their legal and moral obligations 30 years later,” she said.

Ambassador Twining said the international community’s primary objective was to oversee the immediate period between the signing of the accords and the 1993 election, not necessarily to continue monitoring Cambodia’s domestic politics.

“At most we agreed that violations of the Paris Agreements could be referred to the U.N. Security Council or to the Paris Co-Chairs. Realistically, however, there was little appetite remaining for further international involvement,” he said.

Across the political aisle, Noren-Nilsson said Hun Sen and the CPP insist that the agreements "have been implemented, superseded and archived" while the opposition claims they are "unsettled, overdue, and urgent.”

Even in the one area of the agreements that inarguably came to fruition, eventual peace in Cambodia, Noren-Nilsson says the ruling party has attempted to co-opt credit for this.
“Hun Sen's frequent pointing out that the PPA's promise of peace was only realized later through his own win-win policy highlights the failures of the international community's efforts,” she said.

The win-win policy was a decision by Hun Sen to allow Khmer Rouge commanders to maintain their positions and properties if they surrendered to the CPP. So proud is he of this diplomatic accomplishment that a giant “Win-Win Memorial” has been built on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, commemorating Hun Sen’s various achievements. While the memorial celebrates peace, it also celebrates the death of democracy – a panel representing the dissolution of the CNRP is included in the monument.

Peace Versus Democracy

The tensions that existed between peace and democracy for the international community also exist on a domestic level, with Hun Sen and the CPP emphasizing the importance of peace while Rainsy and CNRP defined themselves as champions of democracy.

The CPP has long sought to portray itself as the protector of peace in Cambodia, playing up its role in helping overthrow the Khmer Rouge and the fact that it has presided over 20 years of relative stability after decades of turmoil. The party has adopted an unofficial slogan of “thank peace,” first mentioned in a speech by Hun Sen.

When confronted with human rights abuses, CPP spokespeople regularly dismiss all accusations, saying the first human right is the right to life, as if other guarantees like free speech and environmental protections would result in a total breakdown of society. In a recent video posted to the Twitter page of the Office of the Prime Minister, this point is explicitly made, saying: “The right to life must be a priority, not the freedom of expression or democracy.”

In 2017, Hun Sen even warned that a CNRP victory could lead to civil war, conjuring up traumatic memories of Cambodia’s past chaos to undermine his political opponents. (Implicit in this argument is also the threat that Hun Sen himself would cause that civil war, as nobody else in the country has control of any armed forces today).

Adams does give the PPA credit for bringing peace to Cambodia. “Yes, the PPA did deliver an end to the civil war, because the external actors all stopped supplying them,” he said. Adams said China was the “key party” to the agreements, because it agreed to stop supporting the Khmer Rouge.

But while China played a key role in helping to bring eventual peace, it is now also playing a key role in ensuring democracy may never emerge. China has become Cambodia’s biggest donor and investor, replacing Western democratic nations whose aid came with human rights obligations, allowing Hun Sen to finally become the fully fledged dictator he always wanted to be. At the same time, deepening strategic competition with China is leading the United States to soften, rather than harden, its stance on Cambodia, in an attempt to prevent the country from being fully absorbed into China’s orbit.

“You have somebody like Wendy Sherman going to Phnom Penh,” Adams said, referring to a recent visit by the U.S. deputy secretary of state. “Now the whole game is to try to see if they can split Hun Sen from China.”

Civil Society Choked

The agreements also had one other important legacy: opening up space for civil society. For decades under the CPP, Cambodia enjoyed an unusually free press and active civil society for an authoritarian regime.

“Thankfully, the drafters were foresighted enough to recognize that free and fair elections do not take place in a vacuum, that a functioning democracy requires respect for human rights, in particular the freedom to exchange ideas and engage in political discussion, to meet together and express shared opinions, including through peaceful protest, and to take part in political life without fear,” said Chak Sopheap, director of the prominent Cambodian Center for Human Rights (CCHR). But she said today, those guarantees “seem to only exist on paper,” as respect for human rights reaches “an all-time low.”

During the 2017 crackdown, Hun Sen threatened to permanently shutter CCHR, while five members of another human rights organization were arrested in 2016 and spent more than a year in jail.

Adams said the agreements initially opened up a lot of space, with human rights organizations and legitimate news outlets facing pressure but still able to operate.

“There was a big opening, and then slowly but surely, the boa constrictor has tightened its grip on civil society to the point where there’s basically no air getting into civil society’s lungs,” he said, adding that this “accelerated” around 2017.

The country’s two main independent newspapers were also neutered during the crackdown, with the Cambodia Daily shut down in 2017, while the Phnom Penh Post was bought by new government-friendly owners and muzzled in 2018.

Sopheap said the Cambodian government’s “tolerance for criticism” has dwindled, leading to increased restrictions on civil society that violate both domestic and international law. She said amendments to laws that govern trade unions, NGOs, and the internet all threaten fundamental freedoms, while “unprovoked attacks” continue against opposition activists and independent journalists.

All of these developments, Sopheap says, “stand in sharp contrast to Cambodia’s obligation” under the PPA. She said there is still space for signatories to “live up to their obligations under the Agreements,” which will become particularly important as the next round of elections approaches in 2023. Few independent observers expect the polls to be remotely free or fair.

Adams said Hun Sen’s crackdown was carefully weighted and he’s unlikely to back down now.

“Hun Sen tests domestic and international reactions to every violent or repressive thing he does. He’s tested and found international response in part to be lacking and he’s not afraid of it. The biggest driver of that is the support he gets from China on one side of the coin,” and the lack of action from Western countries on the other.